Hey MVPDays Fans, Well we just wrapped up another fantastic MVPDays Virtual Conference a few hours ago. Our Post-Production Team (ME) has tirelessly worked to get this content up for you the community. The highlight of the show this month for me was the keen work of Kent and Jon from Microsoft (@Wearsy and @PNWAdventureGuy) on their Microsoft Flow Session. It was amazing… You can checkout the trailer for their session here: To watch the rest of the sessions here is your link to the post session playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW-BLrn2azoTIW3pxnZboGDTZHAxh-TRy We hope you really enjoy, Thanks, Dave and Cristal –...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, ***For Immediate Release *** This week at the annual Microsoft MVP Summit two great communities have come together in a partnership to share more great knowledge. “We are extremely excited to partner with The Krewe and their user community. The plan is to make the MVPDays series of Virtual Events, Books, and Media available to The Krewe’s membership. This will provide an exciting framework to continue our commitment of community first. We are also please to make our events available to Krewe members that are interested in public speaking. This will include mentorship, guidance and co-presentation...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, I just wanted to reach out today and say congratulations to resident blogger Cary Sun. He has been blogging here at Checkyorlogs with some amazing content for the past 18 months and just yesterday was awarded the distinguished Microsoft MVP Award. This is a really big achievement and I couldn’t be prouder of him. I still remember when I first met Cary it was a few months after his family had moved from Taiwan in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Wow Cary that was over 10 years ago now). His journey into contributing into the IT Community started...

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, Next week marks my 7th trip to Redmond for our annual MVP Summit. This is the largest gathering of Microsoft Technical Community experts in the world. We get to have some fun, meet with the Product Teams, and learn all about the future from Microsoft. The graphic above shows where everyone is coming in from. I’m obviously with the North American (Canadian) delegation and we have friends coming from every part of the planet. Over 2000 MVP’s and Regional Directors are travelling from all over the world. 80 Countries in total for this amazing event. This...

This is quite a rare scenario, but they do exist more than often in IT! After hitting one of Microsoft’s Azure/Office 365 landing pages that sends you to your ADFS login screen via Netscaler, you encounter a HTTP 400 error message after a successful authentication. Simple reason for this, there is a bug in the Netscaler software. Keep reading.

Task Sequences are used heavily in Operating System Deployment (#OSD), but they are also used to control the workflow of installing applications, migrations, updates and even patching. Just like any piece of work in the IT world, we need to go through a Dev, QA, Prod lifecycle while developing these. More often than not, even the simplest Task Sequence needs a little debugging. Perhaps in your own Task Sequence you’ve developed, or perhaps you inherited the Task Sequence.

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, Today I have commenced work on our newest book Deploying System Center Data Protection Manager featuring version 1801. As part of the book we are going to use once again, our BigDemo series of scripts to deploy the lab. I thought this time it would be fun to show off the script in action as I am building the environment necessary for the lab. You can grab a copy of the scripts as I build them here: https://github.com/dkawula/Deploying-System-Center-Data-Protection-Manager-1801/blob/master/BigDemo_DPM.ps1 I Installed 2 x Domain Controllers, SCVMM, SCOM, S2D Nested Nodes and a Base Server...

Veeam Blog Post – Deploying Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 UR3 with PowerShell Hey Checkyourlogs fans, In this blog post I will show you how you can deploy Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 with Update Rollup 3 to a Hyper-V Virtual Machine. This is a really handy little script because it can help you get Veeam going in your lab in a snap. The basic steps to accomplish this are as follows: Create a Hyper-V Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2016. In my case I have created a VM called Management01. Next you will need to download...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, In this blog post I will show you how you can deploy SCVMM 1801 to a Hyper-V Virtual Machine. This is a really handy little script because it can help you get System Center Virtual Machine Manager going in your lab in a snap. The basic steps to accomplish this are as follows: Create a Hyper-V Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2016. In my case I have created a VM called VMM01. (I built these using my BIGDemo Script) Next you will need to download a copy of System Center 1801 Virtual Machine Manager from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-system-center-release...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, In this blog post I will show you how you can deploy SCOM 1801 to a Hyper-V Virtual Machine. This is a really handy little script because it can help you get System Center Operations Manager going in your lab in a snap. The basic steps to accomplish this are as follows: Create a Hyper-V Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2016. In my case I have created a VM called SCOM01. (I built these using my BIGDemo Script) Next you will need to download a copy of System Center Operations Manager 1801 from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-system-center-release In our...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, For your viewing pleasure we have added a nice modification to our BigDemo scripts used to provision environments for our demos and books. This time we have cleaned up a lot of the manual steps required to get routing working in our example labs in #Azure. The Routing and NAT Switch is what we have fixed up this time. Now, it is a bit tricky to get all this working properly but we have a working prototype: Function Install-NetNat { param ( [string]$VMName, [string]$GuestOSName ) Write-Output -InputObject "[$($VMName)]:: Configuring NAT on the Hyper-V Internal Switch `"$($env:computername)`""...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fan, Here is a preview of some of the amazing content coming out in our next @MVPDays Publishing book on Storage Spaces Direct and SCVMM 1711. We went ahead and built out the lab based on the latest build of Windows Server Insider Build 17079. One of the cool new features that has been added to Storage Spaces Direct in this version is the ability to Deduplication on ReFS volumes. We saw approximately 75-80% space savings in our testing and that is about right in line with what Microsoft was telling us to expect. Honestly, this is...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Today I have been having fun trying to get a Windows Insiders 17079 Cluster build via SCVMM 1711. From the VMM Console when I try to build the cluster I get Error Message 25325. I checked the Create Cluster report in C:\windows\cluster\reports on one of the S2D nodes. It said that a parameter is incorrect. Off to PowerShell on the VMM Server so I tried to manually create it using New-Cluster which should work. New-Cluster -Name S2DCluster -Node S2D1,S2D2,S2D3,S2D4 -StaticAddress 172.16.100.99/24 -IgnoreNetwork '172.16.1.0/24','172.17.1.0/24','172.18.1.0/24','172.19.1.0/24' -nostorage But nope it didn’t work either. So, I decided to try going...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, If you haven’t had a chance to yet you should grab yourself a copy of our latest book. Deploying System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016 – Step by Step https://leanpub.com/deployingsystemcentervirtualmachinemanager2016 In this book we walk through the core networking setup for Storage Spaces Direct and unfortunately in the first version we didn’t document it with PowerShell. There are about a million steps to get this done so I figured PowerShell is our friend for this task. Here is copy of the new script that we built today for our next release of the book which will...

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, As many of you know I’m in the middle of writing our next book which is updating the SCVMM content from 2016 to 1711 Technical Preview. In the midst of trying to automate the lab build I found I nice little anomaly in the Get-SCPortClassification command for SCVMM. My script wasn’t working and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. Well have a little look at this: There is a double space in the name. To work around this just add an extra space in your PowerShell code and you will be fine....

Hey Checkyourlogs fans, I have been updating my BigDemo Scripts which I use in all of our books and wanted to start upgrading them to Windows Server Insider 17079 this week. Now, normally I would just use the standard Convert-WindowsImage.PS1 script to build my gold VHDx files. It mysteriously wasn’t working for me with the Windows Server Insider ISO?? Hmm… Let’s have a look at the most non-descriptive error message ever. Convert-WindowsImage -SourcePath F:\DCBuild_Insider\Windows_InsiderPreview_Server_17079.iso -Edition SERVERDATACENTERCORE -DiskLayout UEFI -VHDFormat VHDX -VHDPath F:\DCBuild_Insider\VMServerBaseCore.vhdx -SizeBytes 60GB -WorkingDirectory F:\DCBuild_Insider -UnattendPath F:\DCBuild_Insider\unattend1.xml -Passthru -RemoteDesktopEnable The Property ‘Count’ cannot be found on this object....

As you know, Veeam released the service pack 3 on December 2017, it’s not fix bugs only, it also includes a lot of new features –
Built-in agent management,
Insider protection for Veeam Cloud Connect,
Data location tagging…
The details information you can check from Veeam website https://www.veeam.com/kb2354 and https://www.veeam.com/kb2353.
The steps are straightforward, but you still need to be careful about two things, the first one is “If you use Veeam ONE to monitor Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Cloud Connect, be sure to install Update 3 for Veeam ONE 9.5 first” and the second is “If you are a tenant of a cloud provider, please contact your provider before upgrading to ensure the provider has applied Update 3 on their end”.

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans, Our team of Expert Authors has had an early start to 2018 as we already have our first book published. This time we looked at the complexities of deploying Microsoft’s Configuration Manager with PKI and documented the heck out of it (220 pages worth). This is also the first time we are trying Leanpub as a publishing vehicle. It has a great platform that let’s us get content out a lot faster than traditional mediums. We are in no means giving up on Amazon this just get you the content a lot faster. We will be...

Hey MVPDays Fans, Today we had an amazing full day long event and I wanted to highlight some really great questions that we had throughout the day. What PoSH Terminal was MVP Thomas Rayner using during his session? Thomas said he is using ConEmu with a custom prompt. https://gist.github.com/ThmsRynr/f394b20caf1c87be2fd3e645891564bc Regarding RDMA and DCB, what is a recommended way to configure DCB through windows DCB commands or just configuring on the switch level? Check page 14 of this guide http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/solutions/Windows_Server_2016_Hyper-Converged_Cluster_over_Mellanox_Ethernet_Solution_Reference_Deployment_Guide_v1.0.pdf https://github.com/dkawula/Operations/blob/master/S2D/Demos/TechMentor-Orlando-2017-PhysicalS2DBuild-2Node.ps1 Here is my Demo Script I have broken it down into a step by step for the config… That...

Hey MVPDays Fans, We have had a chance to compile the session recordings from the MVPDays V-Conf that ran this week January 17, 2018 We had a jam-packed lineup covering many amazing sessions including: Storage Spaces Direct, Azure Site Recovery, SQL HA, Microsoft Flow, Microsoft Teams, .NET, Office 365, Identity, and PowerShell. We have compiled this into a @YouTube Playlist for ease of viewing. You can view the recorded sessions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqVwvxpb00c&list=PLW-BLrn2azoRjlgic9WhWHyytto3mdUSe&index=1 Cristal and I really hope you enjoyed the show this week. See everyone in February for the next round. Dave and Cristal Co-Founders of...

Hey Storage Spaces Direct Fans, As many of you know a LOT of us have been using Mellanox Technology components in our Storage Spaces Direct designs for the past 18 months. Is it time to re-think and start looking at alternate technologies? Well, the answer is likely not. Mellanox’s cut will be will be seen on their Ultra VOA (Variable Optical Attenuator) lineup. Basically, these are Fibre Optic Transceivers and their associated SFP form factor. The announcement by Mellanox earlier last week said that it will be discontinuing it’s 1550 nm Photonics Development Activities. In a statement from Mellanox:...

Hey MVPDays Fans, We have had a chance to compile the session recordings from the MVPDays V-Conf that ran in December 2017. We had a jam-packed lineup covering many amazing sessions including: Storage Spaces Direct, Azure Site Recovery, IOT, SharePoint Search, Azure Blob Storage, Office 365, Identity, and PowerShell. We have compiled this into a @YouTube Playlist for ease of viewing. We really hope you enjoy and see you in January for the next MVPDays Virtual Conference. Checkout it out today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqg5vK4IwRM&index=1&list=PLW-BLrn2azoRrS6XBgeLPVcsgRiRkbRdI Thanks and happy learning, Dave and Cristal Co-Founders of...